WHAT’S SO FUNNY?” Cancer and the Hospital Carnivalesque in Margaret Edson’s Wit

Abstract

Over the years, literary fiction has depicted cancer in various ways, and there are differing opinions on the nature of these depictions. This essay explores the representation of cancer and cancer treatment in Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999) in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. The connection between healthcare and carnival, previously discussed by folklorists and physicians to analyze the use of the carnivalesque in hospitals, is here applied to a literary, fictional piece on the subject. By analyzing how Vivian Bearing, the play’s main character, is depicted as a grotesque body undergoing degradation, inducing and participating in laughter, I consider the carnivalesque nature of her actions, words, and relationships, and establish the presence and relevance of the “hospital carnivalesque” in Wit, a term I have developed to describe the particular form of carnivalesque in the primarily in-patient, medical context. Consequently, the essay argues that the hospital carnivalesque in the play empowers the apparently helpless, terminally ill patient, and complicates hospital dynamics in a manner interrogating traditional assumptions of power hierarchies in the medical setting.